So, did you learn anything life-changing at your lecture?

Is that supposed to be a snide remark?

Yes, I guess so. You go to all these lectures and symposia, three and four a week, and then you come back to the same old routine — bitching and criticizing and grumbling about how stupid everyone else is, but nothing changes. And you don’t do anything differently. That’s a life?

What would you have me do? I retired 20 years ago. Nobody is going to give a 95-year old any kind of responsible job where he can have any effect on the world. I’m in the Golden Age warehouse, my friend. Waiting for the forklift to come and select me. The only defense I have is to try to keep my mind from atrophying — to keep up with current events. To be concerned. Anyway, what’s it to you? Who am I hurting by going to lectures?

OK. Sorry. It’s just that I think too many of us confuse bitching with politics. What was the lecture about this time?

Problems with prisons. Speaker was an ex-warden. The title was, “Rehab or vengeance?”

And what did he have to say?

Nothing new. You can have one or the other, but not both together. That we use prison as a catch-all solution to a lot of unrelated social problems : petty crime, drug use, mental illness, dangerous malefactors, political insurrectionists, terrorists, gang warfare. Most of them not even faintly related to each other. We don’t know what to do with these people so we just lock ’em up so they can’t annoy us. We forget that they all have different problems. If they complain, there’s always solitary confinement. One size fits all. The black hole swallows you. We can go back to dealing with other more interesting topics : the Celebrity Hall of Fame, football, the difference between a pat on the ass and a pass.

But you have to admit; prison works. Those people are taken out of our hair. That’s really the purpose. We don’t really want it to change. It works. So why do we waste time talking about it?

Because it’s expensive. We pay more a year to keep someone in prison than it would to pay for his full Harvard tuition. But a year in prison will leave him exactly where he was before he went to jail, except more bitter and better skilled by fellow prisoner tutors in being a crook. A year’s education with a good teacher in a civics class might start him on the road to change. If you give him the education he missed out on for whatever reason : poverty, anger, skin color, bad luck — to learn about what society owes him and what he owes society — he might come out of jail more inclined to play a useful role and we might all get some benefit from his rehabilitation.

This is what they call in Silicon Valley a “cost-benefit” analysis?

Right.

So then let’s just do it. Why do we need more lectures? What’s stopping us?

Let me list those who are stopping us :

• Politicians who find “Law and Order” a nice resonant off-the-shelf slogan that costs them no campaign funds.

• Private stockholders who find investing in the outsourcing of the correction system irresistibly juicy since crooks can’t vote and can’t even complain without being beaten up.

• Poorly educated correction personnel who have passed a sinecure job down from generation to generation and regard it as their birthright.

• Politicians in need of ready-made jobs to distribute to their friends and donors.

• Victims of crime who prefer an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth to cost-benefit analysis and Christian forgiveness. “My daughter will never walk again because of his DUI. May that son of a bitch rot in solitary the rest of his life. Spend the money on sending my grandson to Yale; not on that animal.”

Pretty tough lineup. What did your warden have to propose?

That while there isn’t much hope of making a dent on the first four groups, there still might be a chance to reach some of the eye for an eye people.

Based on what?

The “Christian forgiveness” bit. The “Lock ’em up” groups include a lot of evangelicals and people who feel left out by elite politics. They tend to be emotional about it. See everything personally. We could try to convince them that Christ was serious when he said that saving one black sheep was worth more than rewarding a saint. Get them really worked up over that. Saving souls. Prostrations before the altar. Tears and ululations. Torchlight parades with confetti for people who are born again. If you can do that you can stifle the other groups, whose reasons are more practical, but who are not about to tackle a fight against Christ.

And what in the world makes you think that such a far-out unbelievable and unanticipated crazy program could ever get a foothold in today’s United States of America?

The election of Donald Trump as President.

Oh. I forgot about that.